EmTech: Illumina Says 228,000 Human Genomes Will Be Sequenced This Year

Record number of genomes being decoded, but cost of DNA sequencing might not fall much further, says Illumina president.

Francis de Souza, president of Illumina

Henry Ford kept lowering the price of cars, and more people kept buying them. The San Diegobased gene sequencing company Illumina has been doing something similar with the tools needed to interpret the human genetic code.

A record 228,000 human genomes will be completely sequenced this year by researchers around the globe, said Francis de Souza, president of Illumina, the maker of machines for DNA sequencing, during MIT Technology Reviews EmTech conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

De Souza said Illuminas estimates suggest that the number will continue to double about every 12 months, reaching 1.6 million genomes by 2017, as the technology shifts from a phase of collapsing prices to expanding use in medicine.

The price of sequencing a single genome has dropped from the $3 billion spent by the original Human Genome Project 13 years ago to as little as $1,000, he said.

During an interview, De Souza questioned whether the price would keep falling at that rate. Its not clear you can get another order of magnitude out of this, he said. Instead, he said, his companys focus is now on making DNA studies more widespread in hospitals, police labs, and other industries.

The bottleneck now is not the costits going from a sample to an answer, De Souza said. People are saying the price is not the issue.

Illuminas sequencing machines, which cost as much as $1 million each, are unmatched in their speed and accuracy. But the companys growth has rested sometimes precariously on two curves. One has been the collapsing price of sequencing. The other is the soaring demand from genome scientists and funding agencies.

During the EmTech conference, De Souza said Illuminas success was due to a hard pivot the company made in 2006, when it got into the DNA sequencing business by acquiring Solexa, a U.K. startup, and bet its fortunes on a technology with no sales, that no one knew if it would work.

Excerpt from:
EmTech: Illumina Says 228,000 Human Genomes Will Be Sequenced This Year